Achieving Your Goals by Talking about Time Differently

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I didn't have time.  I was too busy.  My schedule became too hectic.  We have all made these excuses when we didn't achieve our goals.  Of course, these explanations included more than a bit of truth.  Competing priorities and packed schedules do, in part, become an obstacle to achieving our goals.  However, new research suggests that how we talk about time might really matter when it comes to getting back on track and meeting our original objectives.  Luis Abreu and his colleagues have co-authored a new paper titled "Didn’t Have Time or Didn’t Make Time? How Language Shapes Perceived Control over Time and Motivation."   The authors explain what they found through a series of experiments:

Consumers often purchase products, subscribe to services, and download apps in support of valued goals, yet fail to use these tools as much as intended. But might the language consumers use to describe such goal failures affect how they subsequently pursue those goals? Nine experiments demonstrate that, compared with saying “didn’t have time,” saying “didn’t make time” increases subsequent motivation. This is driven by perceived control over time. Specifically, saying “didn’t make” (vs. “didn’t have”) time makes consumers feel more in control of their time, which increases their subsequent motivation to reengage with the goal.

Jordan Etkin, one of the authors, explains, "“The experiment shows how a simple linguistic cue can shift people’s sense of agency."  Of course, this shift requires being honest with ourselves, and that can be difficult at times. It means attributing our failure to achieve our goals to an internal cause (or own behavior) rather than external circumstances (factors outside our control).  When we feel, we tend to look externally.  We have to overcome that tendency to engage in this type of productive reframing that Abreu and his co-authors recommend.  

Fun & Creative Techniques to Tackle Challenging Goals

Wharton Professor Katy Milkman, author of How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, argues that we should try more often to "reach individual and team goals by relying on short-term gratification instead of willpower." Milkman explains that willpower simply isn't a very effective strategy for goal attainment for most of us. Here's her description of what researchers consistently find:

The research is clear: It doesn’t work. We tend to be overconfident about how easy it is to be self-disciplined, but a big payoff far down the road — or even knowing that a change is simple or cheap — just isn’t enough to keep us motivated. Economists call this tendency to favor instantly gratifying temptations over larger long-term rewards “present bias.” Unfortunately, it’s universal, and one of the biggest barriers to change.

What techniques work more effectively than simply relying on willpower alone?  One strategy she advocates is called "temptation bundling" - something I've blogged about in the past.   Milkman also argues that adding a little fun to our strategies for goal attainment can be highly effective.  Many firms, for instance, have pursued gamification strategies to encourage employees to achieve certain objectives.  Sometimes, even more creative options can be very successful.   Milkman describes one such highly imaginative approach to encouraging people to pursue a healthier activity: 

Every day, nearly 100,000 passengers rush through Stockholm’s Odenplan metro station. Each one of them has a choice: To get to and from their train, they can take the stairs or the escalator. To encourage the former, making a difference to people’s health (9% of premature deaths worldwide are attributed to inadequate exercise), a team of technicians funded by Volkswagen’s “Fun Theory” initiative turned the staircase into a set of giant, working piano keys. The result? Because taking the stairs was now fun, 66% more people than usual chose the stairs over the escalator. 

A Lesson In Setting (and Achieving) Our Goals

Source: Mission to Learn

We can learn a great deal about setting and achieving goals by studying how people engage in physical exercise. That's precisely what University of Pennsylvania scholar Katy Milkman has done very successfully in her career. She features some of that insightful research in her terrific new book,

How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

In one study, Milkman examined the behavior of approximately 2,500 employees at Google.  She studied their exercise habits.   In this NPR interview, Milkman explains the motivation for and structure of the study: 

And we had this insight from research on habits that it seems like the kinds of people who form the stickiest habits have a really consistent routine. They do it in the same time, at the same place over and over again. And so we thought, OK, what if we sort of adopt that insight and build it into our program? One group was basically encouraged to go to the gym at a really consistent time. Then we have a second group, and this is the comparison, where they also told us their ideal time, say, 9 a.m., and we reminded them to go at that time, but we encouraged them to go whenever it was convenient for them. And as a result, that group went at about the same frequency but in a more varied manner. So half of their gym visits were at this consistent time and the other half were all over the place.

What do you think?  I bet you think that the group committed to always going to the gym at 9am would adhere to their exercise goal more successfully.  Well, that's what I thought before I read the results too.  However, that did not turn out to be the case!  She explains why: 

But the big surprise to me was that it was actually the group who had gone at the same frequency but in a more varied way. And when we dug into the data, we figured out why. The answer seems to be that the people who had formed those routines that were really consistent were really rigid. So more often than not, they're going to the gym at that time if they're going, and they actually did form a slightly stickier habit after the end of our program around visiting the gym at that usual time. But if they don't go at that time, they don't go at all, right? So you miss your 9 a.m. slot? Oh, I'm not going to the gym today. Whereas the other group, they go to the gym at 9 a.m. a lot. But if they missed 9 a.m., they have a fallback plan. So then they make it at noon or at 5. And as a result, net net, they're going to the gym more. And so what this taught us was that a really important component of habit is actually having some flexibility. It needs to be I have a first best plan, but when that doesn't work, I'm going to get there anyway.

The lesson here regarding flexibility seems especially important as we navigate unpredictable and turbulent circumstances in our external environment these days.  However, remember that the flexible group still aimed for that 9am gym visit.  They didn't leave their goal completely wide open.   However, they did have a contingency plan - a commitment to get to the gym whenever convenient if they could not visit at 9am.  That combination of a routine coupled with some flexibility seems to be the sweet spot when it comes to successfully achieving our goals.  

The Right Way to Set the Bar High

Successful leaders set high expectations for their team members and challenge them to tackle lofty goals, much like effective teachers and coaches do. How you set and raise the bar matters a great deal, though. To get it right, leaders can learn a lot from what the most effective teachers and professors do... Check out my latest article (The Right Way to Set the Bar High), published by Chief Learning Officer, to learn more about this topic.

A Simple Strategy to Help Us Achieve Our Goals

Source: Gold Dust Dental Lab

Katie Mehr, Amanda Geiser, Katherine Milkman, and Angela Duckworth have published an interesting new study that highlights a simple strategy that might help us achieve our goals.  They studied people's efforts to exercise more often.  They introduced a simple strategy; they call it "copy-paste prompts."  In their experiment, they gave some participants the following instructions:

"In this study, we want to help you learn about an effective hack or strategy that someone you know uses as motivation to exercise. Over the next 2 days, we’d like you to pay attention to how people you know get themselves to work out. If you want, you can ask them directly for their motivational tips and strategies."

In other words, participants had to actively seek out goal achievement strategies from people they knew.   They compared the behavior of participants receiving these instructions to a control group, as well as a group that passively received advice on how to meet exercise goals.  In short, encouraging people to benchmark and learn from others is an effective way to nudge them toward putting in the work to achieve their goals.  It's much better to encourage them to ask for advice rather than telling them what to do.  It's simple and intuitive, and it's not a costly intervention.  The scholars discovered that, 

"A brief and virtually costless copypaste prompt improved goal-directed outcomes over the following week. Specifically, this nudge led to greater increases in the amount of time spent exercising than did passively receiving a strategy of similar quality, highlighting the value of actively finding goal-related strategies among one’s peers."  

Why did this simple strategy prove effective?  They provide several reasons.

1.  Examining the effective strategies of peers raises the probability that individuals will actually employ advice.  Moreover, hearing what works for their peers increases people's beliefs in their own abilities to achieve certain goals. 

2.  The advice may be more "customized and goal-relevant" since the individuals chose the peers from whom they wanted to learn.  

3,  People feel a sense of empowerment and autonomy when they seek out information and advice themselves, rather than being told what to do. 

Problems with Priorities

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160866001@N07/46537652121

As I observe many different leaders struggle with strategy execution, I notice that priority-setting tends to be at the root of the problem.   How do leaders struggle with establishing and communicating priorities?  Here are four patterns of dysfunction that I have observed:

1.  Leaders change their priorities quite often.  Members of the organization think to themselves, "This too shall pass" as they observe the latest "flavor of the month" or "management fad" being championed from the top.   Alternatively, employees simply find themselves confused as to what they should be doing. 

2.  Members of the organization do not agree with the priorities established by the leader.  In some cases, leaders do not recognize the disenchantment.  In other cases, they convince themselves that the employees simply "don't get it" and don't have the strategic vision necessary to chart the organization's path as well as those at the top.   This type of "leader knows best" thinking can be dangerous though.  Moreover, employee engagement falls, and therefore, productivity decreases when employees do not believe that the leader's priorities match their values.  

3.  Leaders do not communicate their priorities clearly.   Too often, the leadership team assumes that employees throughout the organization understand the goals and objectives, when in fact, people are somewhat confused or unclear about the strategic direction and priorities.  

4.  Leaders set too many priorities.  At this point, employees perceive everything as urgent and important.  In some sense, if everything is crucial, then nothing is really crucial.  People do not know how to allocate their time and effort properly in these situations.  

New Year's Resolutions: Put Your Imperfections Behind You!

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Fresh starts are real!  This week we will hear a lot of advice about setting the appropriate New Year's resolutions. We'll also hear about how hard it is to actually adhere to our resolutions.   So many of us establish diet or exercise goals this time of year, but by the spring, we find ourselves struggling to stick with our original plans.  Having said that, recent research does suggest that New Year's Day might be a more effective day for setting a bold goal than a "typical" day during the year.   

Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman,  and Jason Riis published a paper three years ago titled, "Put Your Imperfections behind You:Temporal Landmarks Spur Goal Initiation When They Signal New Beginnings."  They studied "temporal landmarks" - i.e. days that “stand in marked contrast to the seemingly unending stream of trivial and ordinary occurrences” in our lives. These landmarks include birthdays, holidays, new beginnings (of a year or semester), and major life events such as a wedding.  These scholars examined whether an event that marked a "new beginning" could be motivating for people to pursue a particular goal.   Dai, Milkman, and Riis found that landmarks that represent new beginnings are useful to us because they enable us to "leave our old selves behind" and to embrace a better version of ourselves.  We can "disassociate" ourselves from our past imperfect selves, in a sense, at these landmark moments.  That motivates us to pursue a new goal, perhaps to eradicate a bad habit.  

In sum, New Year's Day might just be the right time to attempt to pursue a bold new goal regarding your career, personal well-being, or other aspect of your life.  Of course, much work will remain with regard to adhering to that goal.  However, the holiday will certainly be advantageous when it comes to initiating the pursuit of this new goal, much more effective than January 3rd or 4th might be... unless that happens to be your birthday or some other key moment in your life.  

How To Think About Goals Over Time

Researchers have conducted some interesting new work on goal-setting and achievement.   Insights by Stanford Business summarizes the findings of research conducted by Szu-chi Huang, Liyin Jin,, and Ying Zhang:

New research by Szu-chi Huang, assistant professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, finds that while people benefit from concentrating on small “sub-goals” in the early stages of a pursuit, they should focus instead on the larger objective in the late stages. That notion could be important to any business that entices consumers and employees to set goals, whether as part of an incentive program or service offered.

“When you are just starting a pursuit, feeling reassured that it’s actually doable is important, and achieving a sub-goal increases that sense of attainability,” Huang says. But later, people are no longer concerned about attainment and need to feel that their actions continue to be worthwhile in order to maintain motivation.  “At that point, to avoid coasting and becoming distracted, they need to focus on that final goal to see value in their actions,” Huang says. 

The research appears very consistent with the work on small wins.  You need to have those sub-goals, because small wins are important during any transformation process or challenging task.  However, you need to have the broader vision as well.   This work adds nicely to our understanding of how small wins work by describing the important shift that has to happen over time from small sub-goals to broader objective.

Unreasonable Goals, Unethical Behavior

In a recent Harvard Business Review post, Liane Davey explores the connection between unreasonable objectives and unethical behavior.  Sometimes, you face a difficult situation as a team leader.  You have been given an unreasonable goal to achieve.   Davey examines how team leaders can prevent their employees from engaging in inappropriate conduct as a means to achieving highly aggressive goals.  

First, Davey argues that you need to "define the off-limits options" when discussing how to achieve your objectives.  Davey recommends asking, "What would we not be willing to do to hit our target?”  Second, Davey argues that you need to probe carefully to understand how people are trying to achieve their targets.  Don't just focus on results.  Focus on the behaviors and the processes that are being employed to try to achieve those results.  Third, don't single out publicly those people who are struggling to achieve highly aggressive goals.   Such shaming may cause them to resort to unethical methods to achieve better results.  Finally, keep your eye out for outliers... people doing extraordinarily well in the face of aggressive targets.  If one person or unit is exceeding all others by 30%, you might want to ask, "How could they be doing so much better than all the others?"  Don't accuse them of inappropriate behavior without any evidence, of course.  Probe to understand what their best practices might be, for purposes of sharing those with other team members.  However, be on the lookout for any evidence that they may be crossing the line in pursuit of top notch results.  

In sum, these types of vigilant behaviors will help avoid some very unpleasant surprises.   Don't just complain about unreasonable objectives, or demand that your team go above and beyond to achieve those results. Keep a close eye on how people go about their work so as to avoid putting you and your organization at great risk.   

Supporting Others (or not!) As We Strive to Achieve Our Goals

Stanford Professor Szu-chi Huang has co-authored an interesting new paper about goal achievement along with Susan M. Broniarczyk of the University of Texas at Austin, Ying Zhang of Peking University, and Mariam Beruchashvili of California State University at Northridge.  Their paper is titled, "From Close to Distant: The Dynamics of Interpersonal Relationships in Shared Goal Pursuit.” 

What did these scholars discover about people's behavior with peers as they pursue common goals?   In the initial stages of goal pursuit, people tend to be supportive of one another.  They advise and encourage one another.   They reach out and try to help their peers.   However, as people get close to achieving their goals, they become more distant from their peers.   They are less likely to offer tips to others, or to share important and perhaps helpful information.   According to this article from the Standford Graduate School of Business, "Almost 79% of those in the advanced stage expressed feelings of distance and reluctance to share information with other members, compared with 44.4% in the early stage." 

Huang studied this phenomenon from the perspective of engaging customers in programs such as Weight Watchers.  The findings may have far-reaching implications though.  We know from a variety of studies that sharing information within groups can be a challenge.  Sometimes, we hear that people horde data because, "Information is power."  However, we know that power is not the only reason people fail to disclose information to their peers.  Sometimes, people work in different silos, and for that reason, barriers to free information flow exist.  In other cases, people do not feel safe speaking up and sharing their perspective.  This study suggests that sharing of information may be more prevalent when we begin to pursue a particular objective, but it may diminish as we approach our goals.   Teams leaders, therefore, need to be particularly mindful of facilitating information sharing and knowledge transfer as projects mature. 

The Impact of Conflicting Goals

With the new year upon us, many people will be setting goals for themselves and their organizations.  Of course, we would hope that these goals would be aligned, i.e. that they would reinforce and complement one another.  Sometimes, however, we find ourselves trying to juggle conflicting goals.  Stanford's Jennifer Aaker has conducted research, along with Duke's Jordan Etkin and Rotterdam's Ioannis Evangelidis, on the impact of competing objectives.   What did they find?

1. Not surprisingly, people tend to experience more stress when they have competing goals that they are trying to juggle. 
2. People tend to feel more pressed for time when they experience conflicting goals, even when the goals do not compete for their time. 
3. When people have conflicting goals, they tend to become much less patient.  In other words, they are less willing to wait in line, or on the phone.  They are also less willing to wait for a package to be delivered.  
4. Because they have less patience, people are willing to pay more to save time.  The researchers found that, "Goal-conflicted subjects who felt short on time were willing to pay 30 percent more for expedited shipping of a DVD from Amazon. Such results confirm the hypothesis that feeling pressed for time shortens patience and increases willingness to pay."  

 What's the lesson for all of us as we set goals for 2015?   First, if we are leading an organization, we should be mindful of the pressures we create for others if we establish too many goals that are competing with one another.  We can never align objectives completely, but we can try to minimize conflicts.  Second, we can become more aware of how competing objectives may distort our behavior.  Before we expend resources, we might think about how stress and anxiety may be causing us to spend a bit less responsibly.    Finally, we might think about streamlining our list of goals and objectives for 2015.  If we set too many goals, we may not accomplish anything.  We have to be able to set priorities.  In so doing, we will also reduce the likelihood of stress from competing objectives. 

How to Encourage Persistence

Wharton Professor Rom Y. Schrift and Georgia State Professor Jeffrey R. Parker have written a new paper titled, "Staying the Course: The Option of Doing Nothing and Its Impact on on Postchoice Persistence."   They discovered that people are more likely to persist in pursuit of their objectives if they originally had an option of doing nothing.  In other words, imagine that someone had the option of choosing a membership at Gym A or Gym B.   Now imagine that they were explicitly presented the option of not joining any gym at all.   In the case where this third option of doing nothing is explicitly presented to them, people are more likely to stick to their original goals.  Parker explains, "The intuition is we don’t want to give them the option.  ‘Not doing whatever’ may sound like giving up. But what people decide for themselves is, ‘I didn’t have to do it and I decided to do it, so I’ll stick with it for a longer period of time.'"  The authors explain their conclusions in the paper:

“Sticking to a diet, completing drug regimens, regularly visiting the gym and working through personal or professional challenges are all instances in which persisting is beneficial and important,” the authors write. “Using the right incentive structures, one can drastically reduce or eliminate the tendency of opting out, while maintaining the positive impact that affording no-choice options has on persistence.”